PHP external page

Question

Want to grab list of players from http://www.atpworldtour.com/Rankings/Singles.aspx

There is a table with class "bioTableAlt", we have to grab all the <tr> after the first one (class "bioTableHead"), which is used for table heading.

Wanted content looks like:

<tr class="oddRow">
 <td>2</td>
 <td>
  <a href="/Tennis/Players/Top-Players/Novak-Djokovic.aspx">Djokovic, Novak</a>
  (SRB)
 </td>
 <td>
  <a href="/Tennis/Players/Top-Players/Novak-Djokovic.aspx?t=rb">6,905</a>
 </td>
 <td>0</td>
 <td>
  <a href="/Tennis/Players/Top-Players/Novak-Djokovic.aspx?t=pa&m=s">21</a>
 </td>
</tr>
<tr>
 <td>3</td>
 <td>
  <a href="/Tennis/Players/Top-Players/Roger-Federer.aspx">Federer, Roger</a>
  (SUI)
  </td>
 <td>
  <a href="/Tennis/Players/Top-Players/Roger-Federer.aspx?t=rb">6,795</a>
 </td>
 <td>0</td>
 <td>
  <a href="/Tennis/Players/Top-Players/Roger-Federer.aspx?t=pa&m=s">21</a>
 </td>
</tr>

I think the best idea is to create an array(), make each <tr> an unique row and throw final code to the list.txt file, like:

Array (
 [2] => stdClass Object (
    [name] => Djokovic, Novak
    [country] => SRB
    [rank] => 6,905
 )
 [3] => stdClass Object (
    [name] => Federer, Roger
    [country] => SUI
    [rank] => 6,795
 )
)

We're parsing each <tr>:

[2] is a number from first <td>
[name] is text of the link inside second <td>
[country] is a value between (...) in second <td>
[rank] is the text of the link inside third <td>

In final file list.txt should contain an array() with ~100 IDS (we are grabbing the page with first 100 players).

Additionally, will be amazing, if we make a small fix for each [name] before adding it to an array() - "Federer, Roger" should be converted to "Roger Federer" (just catch the word before comma, throw it to the end of the line).

Thanks.

possible duplicate of How to get string from HTML with regex? and reqular expression problem in php and a couple others - note that this is not to suggest you should Regex, but the the suggested DOM solutions. — Gordon
– Gordon, Commented Aug 9, 2010 at 13:38
no it is not different. You are asking how to fetch a specific node or nodeset from a Webpage. That is done with a DOM parser and XPath and there is plenty examples in the three links above. The only thing that they wont tell you is how to apply the name fix you are asking for. — Gordon
– Gordon, Commented Aug 9, 2010 at 13:42
that's okay. that's why I am telling you. But that's no reason to spoonfeed you the answer. — Gordon
– Gordon, Commented Aug 9, 2010 at 13:52

Gordon · Accepted Answer · 2010-08-09 14:21:44Z

Below is how to do it with PHP's native DOM extension. It should get you halfway to where you want to go.

The page is quite broken in terms of HTML validity and that makes loading with DOM somewhat tricky. Normally, you can use load() to load a page directly. But since the HTML is quite broken, I loaded the page into a string first and used the loadHTML method instead, because it handles broken HTML better.

Also, there is only one table at that page: the ranking table. The scoreboards are loaded via Ajax once the page loaded, so their HTML will not show up in the source code when you load it with PHP. So you can simply grab all TR elements and iterate over them.

libxml_use_internal_errors(TRUE);
$dom = new DOMDocument;
$dom->loadHTML(
    file_get_contents('http://www.atpworldtour.com/Rankings/Singles.aspx'));
libxml_clear_errors();

$rows = $dom->getElementsByTagName('tr');
foreach($rows as $row) {
    foreach( $row->childNodes as $cell) {
        echo trim($cell->nodeValue);
    }
}

This would output all table cell contents. It should be trivial to add those to an array and/or to write them to file.

Pekka · Accepted Answer · 2010-08-09 13:30:18Z

1

SimpleHTMLDOM will make this very easy for you.

The first few lines would look something like this (untested):

// Create DOM from URL or file
$html = file_get_html('http://www.atpworldtour.com/Rankings/Singles.aspx');

// Find all images 
foreach($html->find('table[id=bioTableAlt] tr[class!=bioTableHead]') as $element) 
    {

    }

(not sure about the tr[class!=bioTableHead], if it doesn't work, try a simple tr)

answered Aug 9, 2010 at 13:30

Pekka

451k150 gold badges989 silver badges1.1k bronze badges

5 Comments

James Over a year ago

Will try, actually I want only text and no images.

Gordon Over a year ago

Suggested third party alternatives that actually use DOM instead of String Parsing: phpQuery, Zend_Dom, QueryPath and FluentDom.

Pekka Over a year ago

@Gordon you totally have a point, as always. Haven't looked at phpQuery before, that one looks like it could become my new favourite :)

James Over a year ago

please tell how to catch different <td> with SimpleHTMLDOM, like :nth-child(1) a {}

Pekka Over a year ago

@Ignatz see simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/manual.htm "How to traverse the DOM tree?"

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

PHP external page

2 Answers 2

Comments

5 Comments

Your Answer

Linked

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

2 Answers 2

Comments

5 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Linked

Related